We’re less than two months out from a potential government shutdown. Again.
Under a full government shutdown, millions of federal workers go without pay, most EPA-led inspections for drinking water facilities abruptly stop and the National Institutes of Health could be forced to turn away new pediatric cancer patients. Shutdowns also waste money and cause the public to lose trust in government.
So, much of D.C. breathed a collective sigh of relief when Congress passed two continuing resolutions to keep the government open this fall, with one two days and the other a few hours away from a shutdown. But bouncing from continuing resolution to continuing resolution has costs too, as government agencies cannot make year-long plans and are forced to delay important projects.
House Republicans have wasted the past five-and-a-half months pursuing a quixotic mission to secure deeply unpopular budget cuts that would slash important government functions the American people rely on. Instead of pushing for spending bills destined for failure, it’s time for the House to get to work and fund the budget in keeping with their budget deal. More delays will only lead to less efficiency and could risk delaying key government decisions.
Continuing resolutions are extremely common and not inherently bad. But they are typically used to keep the government open while rational negotiations continue, and that’s not what’s been happening. It’s extremely uncommon to squander that borrowed time on a strategy designed to fail because we recognize that agencies can’t plan if they don’t have a budget.
It’s important to understand how we got here.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act signed into law by President Biden in early June cut government spending, as sought by House Republican leadership, in exchange for a temporary suspension of the debt limit. Within a week of securing these cuts, House Republican leadership walked away from the deal to push for even deeper cuts. Rather than using the remaining four months of the fiscal year to write spending bills consistent with the budget deal they had just secured, House Republican appropriators produced bills significantly below the levels a majority of them had just agreed to.
Put bluntly, these funding bills were a complete waste of Congress’s time. They stood no chance of becoming law, both because they violated the budget deal and because they were too extreme — even for many House Republicans.
For example, the federal government gives money to state and local governments to help ensure our drinking water is safe. The House Interior and Environment bill proposed cutting that program by 59 percent. The bills also wouldn’t be useful as a starting point for negotiations, because the halfway point between House Republican levels and the deal would still break the deal.
This approach wasted four months and almost led to a government shutdown on Oct. 1, the beginning of fiscal year 2024. With a few hours to spare, Congress passed a continuing resolution to keep the government running through Nov. 17.
But instead of using this additional time to finally be productive and start writing bills consistent with the budget deal, House Republicans have continued pushing appropriations bills with drastic cuts to essential programs. And they haven’t made much progress towards that goal, with House Republican leadership pulling five of their 12 appropriations bills and leaving town for the holidays without any tangible plan to finish the five remaining bills in the House or to get them passed in the Senate.
On Nov. 16, President Biden signed another continuing resolution that will keep the federal government running through Jan. 19 and some parts of it running through Feb. 2. By the time the first traunch of this “laddered” continuing resolution ends, we’ll be roughly one-third of the way through the fiscal year, meaning federal agencies will have spent a third of the year trying to manage operations without knowing their full-year budget. If that sounds problematic to you, it’s because it should.
Think about it this way. If a business were planning for the year, it’d need a sense of its total budget before locking in its lease, buying supplies, making hiring decisions and investing in physical capital. It’s the same for the various government agencies. The more time spent relying on temporary funding, the more time agencies are forced to delay long-term planning and investments, which can affect important projects and hiring decisions. This leads to missed opportunities and a less efficient government overall.
At this point, the sole impediment to getting full-year appropriations is House Republicans’ desperate attempts to secure deeper cuts than the budget deal allows, as well as extreme riders that impose new limitations on abortion access and actively undermine environmental efforts. That’s not going to happen.
House Republicans need to change course and start working with the Senate to fund appropriations along the lines of the budget deal. The cost of not reaching a reasonable deal to fund the government is too great, and forcing the American people to careen from near-government shutdown to near-government shutdown is just one more way House Republican leadership is causing chaos.
Bobby Kogan is the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. He previously served in the Biden-Harris White House and on the staff of the Senate Budget Committee.